The Traumas of Unbelonging:

Reinaldo Arenas's Recuperations of Cuba

Laurie Vickroy
Bradley University

Comparatists have recognized in recent decades a shift away

from exclusively national literatures and notions of place-bound
culture. Increasingly we are dealing with what Bruce Robbins calls
"different modalities of situatedness-in-displacement" (250) as
globalization, migration, and forced exile have separated people
from places and made conceptions of ethnicity less static and more
mobile, fluid, and hybrid as they are subject to a greater variety of
cultural influences.' However, these conditions also raise the
question of the relationship between culture and self, and feeling
bound to a place remains an imperative for some, particularly if the
separation from homeland is traumatic. While situations of dis-
placement often foster survival through cultural adaptability, in the
context of traumatic exile a lost home can remain not only psychi-
cally embedded as a place of origin and identity but also of an
anguished dissolution of self. The case of contemporary Cuba and
in particular the work of exiled Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas
(1943-1990) is exemplary, specifically in how the traumas of
revolution, oppression, and dislocation produce a fragmented,
isolated, and dissociated identity and an aesthetic sensibility
compelled to both critique and reconnect to homeland.
Arenas's estrangements from authorities and other Cubans both
before and after he flees Cuba fuel his imagination, provoking
recreations of Cuba through which he can revisit in some way his
losses and hopes for his country and himself. His own displace-
ment also mirrors other Cubans' fragmented political, cultural, and

MELUS, Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2005)

110 LAURIE VICKROY

psychological life. Writing most of his work in exile in the US,^ he

chronicles his own persecution for being homosexual and uncom-
promisingly observes how in Cuban society a powerful, masculin-
ized cultural order attempts to suppress other influences, more
specifically, the nexus of art, gender, and sexuality that he associ-
ates with the feminine. Like many trauma writers. Arenas adopts a
testimonial approach to bear witness for a suppressed past (Vick-
roy 5). His writing carries the imprint of overwhelming, psycho-
logically disruptive events, and he attempts to reshape cultural
memory of these events in his focus on artists' authenticity and
survival, and in imaginatively revisiting emotionally over-
determined contexts symptomatic of traumas. Art provides medi-
ated structures by which he withstands attempts to obliterate his
person and his work. This study will establish the traumatic
contexts of Arenas's life and then will analyze how his imagination
and art, especially through the lenses of gender and sexuality,
become the means to express and, to some extent, overcome
trauma.
Trauma narratives, I contend, are personalized responses to this
century's emerging awareness of the catastrophic effects of wars,
poverty, colonization, and oppression on the individual psyche.
They are oflten concemed with human-made traumatic situations
and are implicit critiques of the ways social, economic, and politi-
cal structures can create and perpetuate trauma (Vickroy 4). They
highlight postcolonial concems with rearticulating the lives and
voices of marginal people, and reveal trauma as an indicator of
social injustice or oppression, as the ultimate cost of destmctive
sociocultural institutions (Vickroy x). Many of these narratives
have characteristics of testimonio or testimonial narrative that
seeks to create a feeling of lived experience and expresses a
"problematic collective social situation" through a representative
individual (Beverley 94-95). Testifying to the past has been an
urgent task for many fiction writers in recent decades as they
attempt to preserve personal and collective memories from assimi-
lation, repression, or misrepresentations (Vickroy 1).
Arenas exemplifies this approach in his recounting ofthe effects
of Castro's regime, describing aspects of Cuban culture lying
outside of official versions, and revealing the follies of Cuban life
and history as he sees them. Arenas shares trauma victims' feelings
REINALDO ARENAS' S RECUPERATIONS OF CUBA 111

of helplessness under persecution, a sense of being tainted, and

lacking social support that would aid healing (Van der Kolk and
Van der Hart 446; Herman 47; Langer 84-96). Exile then com-
pounds his sense of fragmented identity, which he finds profoundly
disturbing, and, like many traumatized, he will go to great lengths
to create or maintain a sense of agency and order. Thus Arenas
engages in repetitive rewriting in order to act and feel a greater
sense of wholeness, to overcome helplessness and fear, to resist
oppression, and to reveal tmths. Like other trauma narrativists, he
testifies to his pain and calls upon readers to be the witnesses
unavailable to him in Cuba. Fellow exiled writer Octavio Armand
describes how exiles engage in "A permanent construction and
reconstruction of what has been lost. . . . Because of the. . . press-
ing need to overcome or sublimate helplessness" (21). Similarly,
Arenas is guided by an obsession with the past, which can be
gauged by how only 32 out of 317 pages of his autobiography
cover the final 10 years of his life, indicating a more powerful
relation to his Cuban past than his present or future.
The trauma of exile, both within and outside the island, per-
vades Arenas's considerations of Cuba. The Cuban situation of
trauma and exile is a unique one. Mark Falcoff observes, "While
all the revolutions of modem history have produced sizable exile
communities, in no other case has the diaspora been so proportion-
ately large, so well organized, so geographically concentrated and
so physically proximate to its country of origin. The result is a
cultural hybrid—a community that is functionally American, but
dwells spiritually in a cloud of imminence" (4). Imminence refers
here to many Cubans' sense that retum will eventually be possible.
Louis Perez describes the traumatic changes wrought by the
revolution, particularly on prosperous Cubans who looked to the
US as a model and protector, expecting that the US would remove
Castro. Though this was never realized, they maintained their need
to retum and yet recreate Cuba elsewhere in the interim (498-500).
This recreation has occurred in Miami, albeit nostalgically. David
Rieffs psychologically revealing book analyzes the lingering
wounds of Cuban exiles, which produce a fixation on the past,
extreme anti-Castro politics, and fantasy stmctures of retum and
triumph. Their identities are exclusively bound up in culture and
place, though these obsessions have begun to wane with subse-
112 . LAURIE VICKROY

quent generations of Cuban Americans thirty to forty years later.

Ibis Gomez-Vega notes how many Cubans left "at a time when the
country need[ed] them most" and that many became "victims to
the public and private chaos created by the socialists' need to
control every moment of people's lives, every thought in their
heads. . . . The Cubans who have fied. . . have left behind not only
their homeland but their families. . . and this is part of the pain
which most Cubans cannot shed. . . easily" (233-34). Cristina
Garcia describes the feelings of Cuban exiles as

a form of banishment. It is a severing from one's homeland, a rift

between here and there, a longing unsoothed, the terrible sense of un-
belonging. . . . For Cubans today, both on and off the island, a pro-
found sense of exile and alienation persists. One doesn't ever feel
fully at home in Havana or Miami, Madrid or Mexico City. New
lexicons have evolved inside and outside Cuba that reflect starkly
different realities. Invariably, something or someone is missing from
the picture. (176-77)

Though Arenas did not identify with most Cuban exiles,^ many
of the potentially traumatic features of their exile are reflected in
Arenas's own life and works. These features include suffering the
loss of homeland, a fragmented or diminished sense of self, a sense
of homelessness and dislocation, isolation, and alienation. Much of
this is replayed in the loss of Arenas's manuscripts through confis-
cation and the importance of their recreation in order to retain his
identity as a writer, a man, and a Cuban. His response to these
traumas is manifest in his obsessive textual recreations of what has
been lost. Repetition is an attempt to master traumas, Freud and
others have observed, but can also indicate emotional stasis and
possession by the past. His work indicates that Cuba is a formative
and continuing influence, and he attempts to recreate it as part of a
process of testifying to injustice and redressing wrongs. To under-
stand his imperatives in this regard, Arenas's traumas both within
and outside Cuba must be elaborated.
Arenas received a state-mandated education, something he
never would have received as a peasant before the revolution, and,
employed as a librarian, achieves a life and identity as a writer
because of the Cuban revolution. Though he embraces its idealism
initially, he is ever aware of the proscriptions against homosexual-
REINALDO ARENAS' S RECUPERATIONS OF CUBA 113

ity in his society. After a brief period of publishing in Cuba in the

late 1960s, he runs afoul of the political and economic vagaries
that transform the state's cultural policies into hard-line Soviet
style demands for literature that serves and supports the revolution.
Arenas's work, which always extols freedom, and which he begins
to publish abroad without state sanction, makes him increasingly
marginal and eventually the state brands him a criminal figure."*
He is eventually persecuted, imprisoned, and censored for being
homosexual, but mostly for refusing to write state-approved works.
Arenas's humiliations of false arrest, escape attempts, suicide
attempts, torture, and imprisonment are chronicled in his autobiog-
raphy Before Night Falls (157-207). Mehuron describes the trauma
of these experiences as an "ethical humiliation" (43) that is also
described by Arenas:

They wanted me to make a confession stating that I was a counter-

revolutionary, that I regretted the ideological weakness I had shown
in my published writings, and that the Revolution had been extraordi-
narily fair with me . . . . I did not want to recant anything, I did not
think that I had to recant anything; but after three months at State
Security, I signed the confession. Needless to say, this only proves
my cowardice, my weakness, the certainty that I am not the stuff of
which heroes are made, and that fear, in my case, had won over moral
principles. (Before 204)

A significant effect of trauma is that victims feel helpless, dimin-

ished, and tainted, all apparent from Arenas's account. Because of
this forced renunciation of his work. Arenas must reclaim and
reconstmct his ethical self through his writing. He must also break
the traumatic silence of those oppressed or denied by the state
because they criticize its excesses.
Arenas's work "performs the work of cultural memory, retriev-
ing much that has been effaced by authoritarian deployments of
power through terror" (Mehuron 47).^ Arenas illustrates the
consequences of this power over individuals through his own life
experiences recounted in Before Night Falls and the novel The
Color of Summer, and in an unrelenting ridicule of Castro through
irreverent portrayal that undermines his authority. With humor that
is both distancing and perhaps therapeutic. Arenas makes fun of
his own painful retraction in The Color of Summer, but also depicts
114 LAURIE VICKROY

writing again: "'Everything I have written before this day. . . is

garbage, and should be consigned to the garbage heap. From this
day forward I shall be a man, and shall become a worthy child of
this marvelous Revolution.' . . . As soon as he could he traded all
the cigarettes he had left for blank paper, and once more began the
story ofhis novel" (332-33).
The fact that others were publishing who did not provoke the
regime must have made Arenas feel more marginal and rejected.^
After Arenas emerges from two years of forced labor (state reha-
bilitation for his homosexuality) and then prison (for an unsubstan-
tiated morals charge), he suffers more punishments: poverty (he
loses his job), his manuscripts continue to be confiscated (abetted
by the betrayals ofhis aunt and others), and because ofthe state's
disapproval he is treated as a pariah, a non-person denied out of
fear by those who know him (Santi 227). These denials and
negations of himself again necessitate his obsessive retums to
writing to assert himself and his view ofthe world.
Arenas's experience as an exile in the US is both similar to and
different from other exiles. He wanted to leave Cuba so he could
be free of persecution and regain his artistic voice. His wish was
fulfilled in the Mariel boatlifts of 1980, where, like other undesir-
ables (criminals, gays, etc.), he was allowed by Castro to leave.
Once outside Cuba, Arenas can write what he wants; he can rail
about his life and criticize Castro and his regime. "I screamed; it
was my treasure, it was all I had" (Before 288). However, like
many exiles, he feels alienated, too disconnected from his culture,
friends, and even himself in the US, where, like other Cuban
exiles, his writing is "stifled by lack of communication, rootless-
ness, solitude, implacable materialism, and above all, envy" (Color
253). He likens his situation to the histories of other exiled Cuban
writers: "on our island we have been condemned to silence, to
osfracism, censorship, and prison; in exile, despised and forsaken
by our fellow exiles" (Before 291).
Exile involves another loss of self for Arenas because he is now
disconnected from the place that had formed his life view and
imagination. "I ceased to exist when I went into exile; I started to
mn away from myself (293). He likens the exile to a person
looking for a loved one's face and not finding it (293). Though he
finds a more amenable life in New York City, where he partakes
REINALDO ARENAS' S RECUPERATIONS OF CUBA 115

enthusiastically ofthe city's gay and cultural scenes, he contracts

AIDS. Nevertheless, Cuba remains his focus and passion in the
majority ofhis work in his post-Cuba years.
In his last years he wrote many works including the novel The
Color of Summer and the autobiography Before Night Falls, both
finished just before his death in 1990 and published posthumously
(Manrique 1). This free but ungrounded exile life is the context out
of which he tells his life story in the autobiography and satirizes
Cuban life and history in The Color of Summer. Before Night Falls
straightforwardly chronicles his hardships, but The Color of
Summer, despite the largely absurdist comic context, also repeats
autobiographical details and switches to moods of rage, fear, and
sadness. The novel's traumatic markings are also revealed in comic
distance and in emotionally over-determined contexts. Like other
Cuban exiles, he tries to recreate his beloved place of origin
through his imagination. It is not a replica, but a product of mem-
ory that thoughtfully examines losses and miseries. Not only Cuba,
but his exile from it, broadens his consciousness and fuels his
imaginative ability for recreation. "Living in exile has brought me
the world of nostalgia, it has offered me a series of things that I
never would have experienced in Cuba. Perhaps my fortune has
been the historical, social, and personal calamities I have suffered,
which have given diversity to my creative experience" (Arenas,
"Interview" 148).
Arenas attempts to recreate the diversity of Cuba through a
multi-voiced narrative filtered through the writer's voice and
dialogue and through a multitude of genres: drama, the picaresque,
satire, letters, magic realism, historical analysis, and the chivalric
quest, among others. This combination creates a simultaneously
camivalesque, grotesque, poetic, and tragic portrait of Cuba under
its dictator, Fifo (obviously Castro) set in the future, 1999. These
genres allow Arenas to amplify the passions, fmstrations, absurd-
ity, and pain of everyday living under an intmsive regime. His
trauma narrative, like Toni Morrison's Beloved, combines testimo-
nial elements with multiple subject positionings to create a dialogi-
cal conception of witnessing, where many voices, emotions, and
experiences intermingle to produce individual and collective
memory and to counteract silence and forgetting imposed by
powerful interests (Vickroy 27).
116 LAURIE VICKROY

Narrative fragmentation also conveys the complex multiplicity

of culture, hybrid identity, and expression. Though the narrative
consists largely of non-chronological short pieces, the fate of the
island, geographical and political, underlies the plot. Andrew
Hurley and Francisco Soto have noted Arenas's deft use of the
camivalesque, as Bakhtin describes it, the mixing of the sublime
and the ridiculous in order to attack authority (Hurley 458-60; Soto
Pentagonia 99). He unravels the traumatic effects of power by
satirically exposing the excesses and unreasonable demands of a
dictator: Fifo commands dead writers be brought back to life to
commemorate his fiftieth (really fortieth) anniversary in power.
This camivalesque approach is also evident in Arenas's depic-
tions of the erotically charged camival celebrating the dictator's
mle. The "ass-wiggling" crowd is outwardly obedient to the
regime, if inwardly resentful, and when swayed by music and
moving bodies, devolves into an anarchic orgy. This metaphor of
the nation of whores signals the oppression that makes people
docile and hypocritical, but also suggests it has to be eased occa-
sionally to attenuate frustration. Further, this state-sanctioned
chaos reveals the culture's contradictory impulses toward order
and freedom. Similarly irreverent are the "religious" ceremonies in
honor of the atheistic Fifo: the universal worship of the "Holy
Hammer," or phallus of a beautiful young man on a parade float,
satirizing the extreme code of masculinity in Cuba, and the hypoc-
risy of denying homosexuality even while engaging in it.
Imagination and self-expression play critical roles in the narra-
tive and ensure the survival ofthe traumatized self for Arenas, who
articulates this stmggle in the personalized form of letters. Letters
in The Color of Summer recount Arenas's insights into past and
present, an analysis of a life in exile, and the possibilities of
writing from there. His letter writers are three personas or aspects
of Arenas himself, illustrating the necessity of personal fragmenta-
tion for social survival (Soto, Arenas 58), and a traumatized
splitting of the individual forced to hide his tme life and thoughts:
there is Gabriel, the good son who pretends to live a straight life
for his mother; Reinaldo, his writer-self; and Skunk in a Funk, the
authentic homosexual self he is with his friends. "Skunk" (who has
escaped to the US) writes repeatedly to Reinaldo (still in Cuba) to
reconnect with the writer who had hoped that when he left Cuba he
REINALDO ARENAS' S RECUPERATIONS OF CUBA 117

could bring his writing and message to the world. He has lost much
of that hope, however, as he lists his many disappointments:
expatriate writers afraid to criticize Castro, his certain doom from
AIDS, the materialism and shallowness of the US, and the sadism
and sexual bartering among gay men in the US.
Through Skunk, Arenas articulates his own diminished sense of
self that he links to his disconnection from Cuba: "Down there, I
was at least real, even though what you might call painfully Real.
Up here, I'm a shadow" (171); "I don't exist, yet I suffer from my
existence" (294). This trauma of unbelonging dominates Arenas's
life after he is made the state's enemy and has to leave. "How can I
go on living... I am just a shell of myself, the old dried-out rind of
myself. . . . If I live another hundred years here, I will still be a
stranger, a foreigner, an alien" (296). Eventually his Cuban self
writes back, reminding him of the abjection of living under tyr-
anny, of not only having to accept oppression and humiliation but
to "applaud [it] enthusiastically" (351). Certainly his imminent
death from AIDS must have devastated Arenas, and his continued
sense of unbelonging, which already existed in Cuba, is perhaps
exacerbated by life in the US, but, more importantly, one senses
that the freedom of exile also brings loneliness and a missing sense
of self as connected to place. The community of artists he once
knew in Cuba before the severe repression of dissident thought is
fragmented by ideological differences in the larger world, where
Arenas is faced with many defenders of Castro.^
For Arenas the situation and mission of the artist must be to
resist appropriation and oppression; therefore, the authentic artist is
a political rebel and social outcast. The silence and hopelessness
that characterize trauma are indicators and consequences of power
relations and must be resisted. Under repressive cultural policies
the artist risks punishment by the state and often has to resort to
secrecy and subterfuge to ensure his or her work will survive. The
Cuban artists' community is devastated by state surveillance and
suppression. Arenas portrays several actual Cuban artists, includ-
ing himself, who are persecuted by the state, and whose creative
lives are curtailed by poverty, forced labor, or imprisonment.
Declaring his artistry and his homosexuality to be essential aspects
of himself. Arenas challenges a homophobic and dogmatic state by
his very existence. He refuses to submit his writing for approval by
118 LAURIE VICKROY

the state apparatus' cultural organization, UNEAC (Cuban Na-

tional Union of Writers and Artists). His constant rewriting of his
manuscript, continually lost through misadventures or betrayals (a
mnning gag in The Color of Summer, but also a reality of Arenas's
life), symbolizes his stmggle for authentic expression against a
state which feels art should only be in its service. "Arenas'[s]
militancy was in support of individual freedom. If one thing is
constantly repeated throughout his work it is the challenging and
undermining of all systems of power that attempt to establish
themselves as absolute authority. . . . His rebelliousness and sub-
version were creative and directed toward positive and life-
affirming actions: the right of individuals to express themselves
freely" (Soto, Arenas 32). His writing is witness to the life he
wants to live: in complete freedom to express any view and in any
form.
The loss of art, and hence cultural expression, occurs frequently
in the novel. The eminent poet Virgilio Pinera reads his poems in
gatherings made secret to avoid party officials and immediately
bums them in fear of regime spies. Art offends the state. Arenas
suggests, because it takes people away from the realities of daily
life into worlds of beauty and imagination, and by focusing on
individual and collective suffering it resists the doctrine of revolu-
tionary collective optimism that conveys a false sense of existence
that denies suffering. Art's destmction represents a traumatic loss
of self and voice, but also a terrible loss to Cuban cultural identity
since artists are either deprived of their country, absorbed by the
state, or silenced. The state becomes the culture instead of art.
Telling examples ofthe interconnection of art, identity, and culture
are articulated when 1) Arenas's three selves become united only
in the library, where books open up the world, beauty, and ideas,
and 2) when he says "All of my characters form a single mocking,
despairing spirit, the spirit of my work, which is also, perhaps, the
spirit of our country" (352).
Imaginatively he reinvokes committed exiled artists who also
had to express their love of Cuba from a distance. He emphasizes
women artists, historical and contemporary, as similarly marginal-
ized as gays, and though he satirizes them, he also analogizes their
lives and work to the difficulties of being a suppressed artist. Two
historical portraits include the nineteenth-century writers Gertmdis
REINALDO ARENAS' S RECUPERATIONS OF CUBA 119

Gomez de Avallaneda and La Condesa de Merlin. Avalleneda was

a romantic poet and rebellious exile (Harter 51). Resurrected to
celebrate Fifo's 50 years in power, she resists his appropriation of
her work for the state by heading to the US in a boat (which
eventually sinks). While escaping she meets writer and activist
Jose Marti (who remains a Cuban cultural hero), also resurrected,
retuming to Cuba, despite death threats, to lead another revolution
and to escape the materialism and superficiality of the US. Their
dialogue articulates the dilemmas of many exiles and artists,
including Arenas: she says if Cuba cannot be saved, then save
yourself and find somewhere free to write, and Marti replies life
has to have meaning even if one has to die for a cause (Color 51-
60).
Arenas's inclusion of Maria de las Mercedes Santa Cmz y
Montalvo, la Condesa de Merlin, suggests lost historical legacies
and the need for art and beauty amid deprivations. Merlin, another
exile, spent much of her lifetime in Europe and her depictions of
Cuba were attacked because of male critical bias and because she
lived abroad for so long (Rodenas, Gender 218). She was, how-
ever, a perfect example of the displaced artist. Having spent many
years in France and Spain, she adapted to different cultures and
was a patroness of the arts, with a celebrated salon. Her work does,
however, reflect the loss of her homeland and the compulsion to
recreate it within the imaginative space of her writing.
In Arenas's irreverent portrayal. Merlin's name and prodigious
sexuality link her with the gay queens and their rivalries. Arenas
himself used Merlin's name as a pseudonym in case his letters
were intercepted by the police (231). Although he discredits her
writing like many male critics. Arenas also uses Merlin as an alter-
ego or a "projection for unresolved homosexual fantasies," and he
even updates Merlin's work in his own Voyage to Havana (231).
In The Color of Summer Merlin retums to Cuba from France to
find that her ancestral home has been tumed into a gigantic men's
urinal by the state. This, and Merlin's singing, which moves and
distracts the sexually engaged men in the urinal, indicate the
degree of the regime's destmction of Cuba's cultural legacy and
suggest the powerful beauty of art. For Arenas and other contem-
porary Cuban writers. Merlin symbolizes a lingering "gender and
120 LAURIE VICKROY

cultural marginality" and "elusive nationality" for Cubans (239-

40).
Arenas's most affecting portrayal of a woman artist is his
embellishment of the actual life and work of painter Blanca
Romero. Forced into prostitution when her husband is jailed, she is
reduced to stealing painting supplies from other artists who are
supported by the state for their conformity. She cannot sell her
works, which Arenas calls "extraordinary" (Before 250). In The
Color of Summer she embodies artists' suffering under Castro
while trying to maintain artistic authenticity, becoming the fic-
tional Carla Mortera, whose works inspire Skunk in a Funk's
meditations on the power of art. Suggesting the magical realist
effects of her work, he says viewers experienced a visceral, bodily
response to her imagery; they "had injured themselves on the
leaves and flowers" (Color 370).
Looking at one of Carla's portraits. Skunk tries to explain the
layers of meaning communicated through it, suggesting the power
of art, through beauty, to reveal the pain underlying the surfaces of
existence and the consolation of this tmthfrilness that is camou-
flaged by authorities and quotidian life.

This painting, like all extraordinary things in this world, had the
wondrous ability to hint at depths of mystery, at facet after facet of
significance. . . . This lovely young poet was holding a book . . . she
was looking outward at the spectator of the painting. To Skunk in a
Funk this meant that all the terrible truth the book contained was
useless, that there was something more terrible still that lay beneath
the first discovery, and beneath that, things still more terrible. . . .
That work was touched with an infinite grief, as terrible as the resig-
nation that also filled it. . . . One could say that it was the sum of all
misfortunes, all calamities, concentrated in one horrific, stoic act of
wisdom. That woman, that painting, was not a painting; it was a spell,
an awesome and irrepeatable force that could have been bom only out
of an ecstasy of genius and madness. It was enigma and consolation;
it was faith in the belief that come what may, life does still have
meaning; and was absolute despair. (370-71)

The sight of a room full of her paintings makes Skunk "entranced,

and temporarily oblivious to all the world's horrors—especially the
horror of being alive—[he] could not tear himself from the por-
REINALDO ARENAS' S RECUPERATIONS OF CUBA 121

trait" (371). For Skunk, the painting expresses the traumas of life
that are often repressed and, in doing so, in shaping them artisti-
cally, fulfills a consolatory, even therapeutic function of art in
provoking thought, engagement, and grief rather than silencing or
suppressing human pain.
Like many Cuban artists, Carla creates without benefit of
traveling outside Cuba to see other artists' works, and without
institutional support. Despite poverty, surveillance, and cultural
sterility, Carla's frenzy of creation, 300 paintings in a month, is
Arenas's metaphor for the powerful need for self-expression,
particularly when it is threatened. When she borrows the name of
Skunk's manuscript for one of her paintings, he acknowledges
their shared gender and artistic identification: Skunk "knew that
Carla and she were a single person and that their works therefore
complimented one another" (389). When she exhibits her works in
the eighteenth-century convent (coincidentally. Merlin's school)
that she and her friends have ransacked, it becomes for many
viewers a magical experience. When Carla retums to view her
paintings again, she discovers that they have been destroyed by
Fifo's men. She then ends her life (and the block she lives on) in a
self-immolation. This self-sacrifice demonstrates the compelling
need for self-expression, becoming sometimes a matter of life and
death, with resonance in Arenas's own life, finishing this manu-
script as he was dying of AIDS. Through Blanca/Carla, Arenas
explores the obstacles to artistic creation under a hostile regime,
art's capacity to articulate human depth, and art's simultaneous
necessity and fragility.
Arenas empowers the feminine in association with art, attribut-
ing rare artistic insight to women or gay men, from greats like
Pinera and Lezama Lima to the less successful queens like Delphin
Proust and the aspiring writers of bilious autobiographies he
nicknames the Bronte sisters. This feminization challenges the
hyper-masculine, logistical, heterosexual military stmcture of the
regime that has almost destroyed him. Arenas depicts very few
heterosexual male artists to make the point that Cuban society has
marginalized such activity, deeming it effeminate. Arenas's own
penchant for fantasies, words, and stories was considered pejora-
tively feminine and freakish by his own family, as he recounts in
Before Night Falls. Further, his mother's disappointment at his
122 LAURIE VICKROY

failure to lead a conventional masculine, heterosexual life becomes

a source of constant pain and anger for him. She is absorbed by
homophobic cultural standards that prevent her accepting her son's
identity as gay or as an artist. He cannot show her his frankly
homosexual writing, which he considers a fundamental part of
himself.
Artistic critiques of Cuba figure largely in Arenas's works,
reshaping cultural memory through the portrayal of an array of
unofficial Cuban lives, and using parodic metaphors for how a
repressive society controls and wounds its members but also for
how they survive. Creative manifestations of Cuban life abound in
The Color of Summer as mocking refrisals to conform, as critiques
of repressive forces, and as examples of how art consoles the artist
in its revelations. Arenas is trying to preserve ignored or broken
aspects of Cuban life. He fills what he fears will be a void of
silence in recreating the 1960s and 1970s.

I feel an endless desolation, an inconsolable grief for all that evil

[Cubans' history and bowing to repression], and yet a furious tender-
ness when I think of my past and present. That desolation and that
love have in some way compelled me to write this pentagony,' which
in addition to being the history of my fury and my love is also a
metaphor for my country. (Color 255)

His imaginative approach transforms the desperate, violent, and

sometimes joyous street life of gay men into literary culture,
demonstrating their penchant for the creativity of everyday life in
the face of deprivation. Arenas gives us picaresque episodes of
their daily pleasures, dangers, and thwarted desires: Eachurbod's
semi-chivalric quest to get laid in a men's latrine, super queen La
Reine des Araignees's ("Queen ofthe Spiders") epic sexual cross-
country adventures in a tmck, among others. In "New Thoughts of
Pascal or Thoughts of Hell," he analyzes the intertwining of
individual and social conflicts in Cuba: "Poverty makes us crimi-
nals; money makes us murderers"; "Friends are more dangerous
than enemies because they can get closer to you" (187). Like many
artists. Arenas plays out an integration of self and the world in his
work (Rose 77). He documents this world and his own survival, as
well as employing experimental, absurd, and nightmare techniques
to convey the nature of this experience.
REINALDO ARENAS' S RECUPERATIONS OF CUBA 123

Some of Arenas's most effective and creative reconflgurations

are in his hybrid and gendered uses of language and metaphor.
Arenas's multigendering and transgendering of speech, as Hurley
notes (463), is manifest in gay men being referred to as she, or
sometimes as both genders in one sentence. The effects are gender
confusion, in contrast to the insistent machismo of Cuban authori-
ties and the "bull tops," men who only penetrate other men, and so
believe they are not homosexual themselves. The nicknames of the
queens connote power, aristocracy, and distinction. Their monikers
include La Reine des Araignees, the duchess, Super-Satanic, etc.
The recital of the "Seven Major Categories of Queenhood" at
Fifo's ceremonies links male and female with universal attributes
and professions, but which go against traditional gender categories.
For example, the second category. Beauty, "produces great artists
and impassioned suicides," citing the examples of Dostoevsky,
Woolf, and Proust, all writers of ambiguous sexuality (78-79).
With these gender reconfigurations. Arenas asks readers to rethink
gender categories and dominant masculinization instituted by state
control.
Arenas's metaphorical creations of animals and the natural
environment reflect the natural beauties ofhis Caribbean home, but
they also implicate humanity's animal-like nature and demonstrate
the perversion of nature linked to the Castro regime. Arenas's
nickname. Skunk in a Funk, humorously suggests the status of a
sad outsider, and La Reine des Araignees the cmel side of Arenas's
sometime friend, writer Delphin Proust. The novel's title refers to
the glare of the sun. Once associated with the beautiful, sunny
beaches Arenas and his friends formerly loved and frequented,
then eventually denied to all except the elite and tourists, the sun
has become the washed-out spotlight of state scmtiny and inhibi-
tions. Fifo is depicted as trying to change the natural world for
economic advantage; he wants to plant apple trees, though the
Cuban climate and geography will not support them. The most
extreme metaphor of power and nature is the Bloodthirsty Shark,
Fifo's favorite henchman, trained to sadistically kill and rape
dissidents, or the "rodents" who gnaw away at the island's base to
escape the island prison. The shark evokes nature but also some-
times a cmelly devouring sexuality that has resonance for Arenas
as his own sexual life has devoured him. Moreover, the image is
124 LAURIE VICKROY

effective in satirizing the bmtalities of state terror. Even the shark

eventually tums away from Fifo, as his sexual inclinations guide
him into a very public acrobatic sexual encounter with the "queen"
Mayoya, which Fifo regards as treason. The shark finds himself
condemned to death by the jealous dictator and evades attempts on
his life, leading other sea creatures to gnaw at the base of Cuba as
well. All tum against Fifo once the island is gnawed away and his
buried arsenal becomes inaccessible. The solipsistic and murderous
leader ends up in the jaws ofthe shark.
In imagining lost or suppressed aspects of Cuba, Arenas helps
situate exiles, but also explores the symbolic and narrative possi-
bilities of a new world order. His explorations of how gender and
sexuality inform imagination are linked to conflict and persecution
and their resultant traumas, but also to a restorative art that pro-
vides a place of contemplation of, and possibilities for, greater
freedom. The novel, as Bakhtin envisions it, and as Arenas prac-
tices it, illustrates culture as multifaceted, contradictory. If one
particular viewpoint wins out, the others are driven underground
and the complex reality becomes obscured: hence Arenas's cri-
tiques of systems, capitalist or totalitarian, which stifle human
imagination. He demonstrates that artistic expression is cmcial to
articulating traumas: in his obsessive need to rewrite his lost works
and the Cuban past, to witness for the oppressed, and to demon-
strate the value of the creative imagination to express human
experience and to reveal absurd and destmctive pattems of behav-
ior.
Arenas, who would probably agree with Derek Walcott's dic-
tum of "history as a prison" (qtd. in Punter 49), notes this essential
contradiction about Cuba:

Two attitudes, two personalities, always seem to be in conflict

throughout our history: on the one hand, the incurable rebels, lovers
of freedom and therefore of creativity and experimentation; and on
the other, the power-hungry opportunists and demagogues, and thus
purveyors of dogma, crime, and the basest of ambitions. These atti-
tudes have recurred over time . . . always the drums of militarism
stifling the rhythm of poetry and life. (Before 90)

In his imaginary liberation of Cuba, the island floats aimlessly

because the people cannot agree where to steer it. "Every single
REINALDO ARENAS'S RECUPERATIONS OF CUBA 125

person wanted.. . to govem the island the way they wanted to, and
to steer it in the direction they wanted to go in, no matter what the
next person thought" (Color 455). Consequently, it ends up
sinking. His own traumas, and Cuba's, still haunt Arenas's imagi-
nation. Though he ends his novel with the defeat of the despot, the
people's self-destruction also indicates his fear that the old dialec-
tical pattems of freedom and oppression will continue. Writing
without hope for his own future, he hopes for his country to work
through and break free of these repetitions but cannot imagine yet
how this can happen.

Notes
1. The United Nations RefUgee Agency currently places the number of people
uprooted from their countries due to armed conflicts or economic needs at 20
million. This does not include people displaced within their own countries,
estimated at another 20-25 million (UN 6). The number of Cuban exiles to the
US and elsewhere is estimated at 700,000 since 1959 (Alvarez-Borland).
2. Of Arenas's 23 books, one was published in Cuba (1967), four in Latin
America (1972-86), thirteen in Spain (1981-92), and five in the US (1986-91).
These are first publications in Spanish and do not include the numerous
translations of his work. Seven of these works were published posthumously
(Soto, Pentagonia 177-78).
3. Arenas often has conflicted relations with other Cuban exiles and academics
he meets who do not share his views of Castro or are not concemed with
literature or gay life (Before 290; Obejas 2). He is particularly alienated by
Miami, which he considers a "caricature" of Cuba, a "plastic world, lacking all
mystery, where loneliness was often much more invasive" (Before 292-93).
4. As the revolution acquired an increasingly Communist bent, Castro adopted a
Stalinesque criminal code toward gays and dissidents and a strict political and
moral stance against homosexuality and art as non-essential activities that could
destabilize Cuban society (Mehuron 49). Castro enforced "heterosexual
familialism" as the social structure he believed was most invested in building a
new society (Mehuron 42). Rodenas notes that "the years 1968-71 mark a
turning point in Cuban culture toward greater state control and ideological rigor
demanded of the writer" ("Literature" 287), and Arango refers to the extreme
dogmatism ofthe "Gray Five Years" (1971-76) (122). See articles by Sanchez-
Eppler, Epps, and Mehuron for extended discussions ofthe treatment of gays in
Cuba and Arenas's fictional responses. Such policies were devastating to many
writers, wearing them down or forcing them to recant publicly or to go into exile
(Santi 231). Herberto Padillo, a once defiant writer like Arenas, is forced to
recant his work and inform on others after being beaten by police in prison. His
confession is filmed and the other writers he names as similar offenders are told
to also rise and confess, including Virgilio Pinera and Jose Lezama Lima (who
reftises) (Before 136-37). Padillo's humiliation is savagely lampooned and at the
same time expiated in The Color of Summer.
126 LAURIE VICKROY

5. "[Arenas's] . . . peasant aesthetic dramatizes the raw hunger for food, the
ferocious orality of need and freedom exercised by the basic irreverence of
erotic conquest and poetic license. The experiential materials of this aesthetic,
compounded by life under the dictatorships of Batista and Castro include the
sterilization of the earth by one-crop economic policies; perpetual, gnawing
hunger; dehumanized labor without end or reward by militarist labor recruitment
policies; the absence (censorship) of literature; the death of private space by
housing shortages and neighborhood surveillance mechanisms; the virtual
shrinkage of future possibilities by imprisonment and torture in the Cuban State
Security systems; and compulsory militarist masculinity exacted by the Castroist
revolutionary legal and moral codes" (Mehuron 47).
6. The Unesco Statistical Yearbook and the Anuario Estadistico de Cuba report
publication of literary texts between the years 1975 and 1985 averaged around
300 books annually (cited in Johnson 115). Though Arenas was published
overseas during this time, he was not often compensated for it, compounding the
frustration of not being read by his own people, those who would most fully
understand his work.
7. Arenas had several conflicts with Castro sympathizers, who could not be
convinced ofthe human rights abuses occurring in Cuba (Before 301-303).
8. Arenas's manuscript of Farewell to the Sea was confiscated and had to be
rewritten three times (Soto, Arenas, Twayne 34). Sanchez-Eppler notes Arenas's
"obsessive capacity for rewriting his life" occurring "both in the sense of
revisiting the same scenes in different books . . . and recomposing the same
book, after successive losses, confiscations and complicated smuggling, and
reunification with his manuscripts" (157).
9. The pentagony is five novels constituting a "secret history of Cuban society
and a writer's autobiography," according to Arenas (Soto, "Documentary" 1).
They include Singing from the Weil, The Palace ofthe White Skunks, Farewell
to the Sea, The Color of Summer, and The Assault.

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